From the Library of Congress, in Washington, DC.
Jennifer Harpster: My name's Jennifer Harpster,
I'm a digital reference specialist for the Science Technology
and Business division here at the Library of Congress.
I'd like to welcome you to today's program, Farming,
Food Security and Climate Change.
This program is the first of a series of programs in 2009
that is presented through a partnership between my division
and NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center.
Our speaker today is research scientist
and geographer Molly Brown.
From Goddard's Biospheric Science Branch.
Dr. Brown works on long-term data record development,
as well as on the impact of climate change
on developing countries in Africa.
Molly received her MA in 1999, and PhD in 2002, both in geography
from the University of Maryland at College Park.
Before becoming a geographer, she got a bachelor's degree in biology
at Tufts University, and then joined the Peace Corps.
Yay. Serving from 1992 to 1994 in Senegal, West Africa.
During her studies at Maryland, Dr. Brown worked at NASA,
and worked at the US Agency for International Development,
Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
That's also called USAID.
Currently, she is NASA's representative on the USAID.
Famine Early Warning System board of directors.
She serves on the national council
of the association of American geographers.
And chairs the science committee
of the Baltimore-Washington partnership for forward stewardship.
In 2008, she received NASA's Exceptional Achievement
in Science award, and published a monograph with Springer-Verlag,
entitled Famine Early Warning Systems and Remote Sensing Data.
Okay. Today's lecture will focus on the global food system,
how climate change will differentially affect the poorest
countries, with sustenance, agricultural systems,
and how local agricultural capacity continues to be at the center
of food provision, for many of the world's poorest.
So please join me in welcoming Dr. Molly Brown.
[applause] Molly Brown: All right.
So, thank you all very much for coming, and I really appreciate
that there's so many people, I know we have a shortage of chairs.
So, today, I will talk again about the global food system,
and also I'll begin with the definition of food security
about how food production and food security are related,
and how food prices and fuel prices are interact,
and how they impact food security.
I'll also give you a little bit of insight about west Africa,
and about how food and local food prices are related,
and then I'll go back up to the global scale.
And let me just say that I'll give you the punch line now:
the bottom line is that how the people who live
in agricultural societies, how successful they are
in agricultural development and agriculture
in food production themselves, has a huge impact on their ability
to feed themselves, and there's a lot of global factors
that impact their ability to produce food, and enough food
to feed themselves and their families.
And this will have a big impact on us as well
as their future ability to be food-secure.
So, food security is not the security of fields,
but really is the ability of all people to attain sufficient food
for an active and healthy life.
And, of course, despite the technical capacity
to feed every single person on the planet adequately,
we have still failed to do so.
And there are a lot of trends that contribute to food
and security globally, and these include population growth,
energy cost, geopolitical disparities,
distribution of natural resources, and, of course, climate.
And so none of these things are new.
They all have been around for centuries, literally.
I mean, obviously there's always been poor regions and rich regions,
and the difference now is that there are a lot more people on the planet,
and the planet isn't getting any bigger, and although a lot
of places have had great technological transformations,
other places haven't.
And so the fact that, in 2009, we're still talking about food, security,
and food security problems,
really means that we haven't done a good job moving the technology
from the places that have it to the places that don't have it.
And of course, global monitoring of food resources needs global data,
and that is why I'm talking to you about this today.
It's because NASA is a very important player-actor
in using satellites remote sensing to look at global food production.
Today, we have a huge amount of different kinds
of agricultural areas all over the world, and,
because of globalization, it really makes a big difference to the price
of bread in DC, if we have a big drought in three
out of the five major reproducing areas,
the price of wheat will go up.
And that is, really been the first time that this has happened.
So, global monitoring of resources and food production need satellites.
Because they are obviously global.
So, I'm going to give you a little bit of background on hunger.
So, there are a lot of places that are food insecure,
we have these places that look black on this screen here,
which have over 35% of the entire population is food-insecure,
and that's men, women, children.   But it's usually not all the time.
It's, at some point, they have a deficit of resources.
And there are a lot of different countries.
So, look at where those are,
and some of those same countries are expecting
to double their population in the next 50 years.
These are the projections from 2005-2050.
In those, again, in the same way, we have a lot of regions
which are likely to have a deficit in rainfall.
Although there are two different colors on my screen here,
doesn't look like it here, but I think that there are a lot
of different areas that will experience decline in rainfall.
And globally, everyone is expected
to have increased temperatures due to industrialization.
So, this is a plot from the intergovernmental panel
on Climate Change 2007 Report.   You all should have heard of that.
Thanks to Al Gore, I'm sure you've all heard of it.
And so, what this plot shows us is that, you know,
in all the different continents, we expect to see,
the black line is the observed temperature change
from 1900 to 2000.
So we see this huge increase in observed temperatures,
and this shaded area here
on all these different plots is the global climate change models,
the global climate models, they're the models which show
that we are capturing this increase in temperatures.
When you drive those models with simply pre-industrial CO2
or other greenhouse gases, we expect to see this, sort of,
no changes in temperatures.
And what we can conclude from this slide is
that the global climate models do a great job in capturing variations
in temperature, and that, in Africa, so, for example, if we look at this,
we see that we expect that we've seen a one-degree increase
in temperatures throughout the last 100 years.
And that the temperatures are likely to continue to increase because,
of course, we're continuing our industrial activities,
and very little has been done to reduce greenhouse gases.
Another point I want to make is that the global climate models,
although they capture the variations in temperatures extremely well,
they're not very good at capturing changes in rainfall.
So we really don't know what is likely to happen with variations
with the water cycle in many places of the world.
It might be that a lot of places will get wetter,
and other places will get drier, but we still don't know
where those places will be.
So, another consequence of increasing temperatures is
that we're likely to see, in semi-arid zones,
places that get very little water.
And today, increasing evapo-transpiration and a reduction
in the amount of, so this area, here, are places that we expect
to see 20% reduction in the growing period in this scenario
from the climate change panel.
And basically, that is the business as usual scenario.
And the one on the right, we see far less reduction,
far less area impacted by shorter growing season,
and that's for a scenario where we actually change the amount our
behavior, and the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere.
So let me talk a little bit now, now that I've given you
that introduction on where we are at globally,
how does food demand markets and ecosystems interact?
So here we have agricultural production,
and this is just simply how much food is produced by every farmer.
In a particular country.
And my great example I like to use is Niger.
Because, unlike Senegal where I have a lot of personal experience,
Niger is a land locked country, it has no ports, practically no rivers,
and has very few ways of exporting its goods,
other than over really bad roads.
And so, climate change, therefore, as I was just showing you,
will probably impact rainfall, we don't know exactly how,
but it will definitely make temperatures go up,
and these things will impact agricultural production.
But today, I want to say that, you know,
these changes are really quite minimal, and are really not
as important as all the other things going on.
So we have a growing population, which is very very important.
The more people there are, the more agriculture happens,
the more fields are planted, and the more food that's produced,
and there's also rising diet expectations, so all the people
who move to the city want to eat more meat and poultry and eggs,
and milk, and that has a big impact on what the farmers do.
Do they produce, you know, very high grow crops?
Or do they make dairy farm, or what do they do?
You know, especially in places like China and India,
the trends in what people eat has a big impact
on what people produce globally.
And then we have other market forces,
demand for natural resources here, and this, a big one here is water.
So if you have a lot more people wanting electricity,
and so you have competing demand between farmers who want
to irrigate crops, big dams that will be put in to make electricity,
and urban areas that really will want more water, and we can look at,
for example, California, just in the last couple days, they've announced
that the farmers are out of luck.
Because the urban areas are going to need more water than was expected,
and so therefore the farmers are just going to be, like, I'm sorry,
we're not going to give you guys any more irrigation water.
And that doesn't include all the demands for natural ecosystems,
and for electricity, and so all of these things interact
to impact agricultural production.
And then we have the big one, technology.
We all know that the agricultural systems
in the West are very different than those
in subsistence agricultural areas, and I'll talk about this more,
but this has a big impact
in how much grain is produced per square meter on the ground.
So, as all these things interact, we have more people,
and then there's this feedback here where,
if we don't have enough food produced in a particular area,
you have increasing land area and cultivation, because, for example,
there's inadequate technology,
which leads to landscape falterations [spelled phonetically],
which then feed into the climate change, in causing further increases
in temperature and further declines in rainfall, for example.
And this is a particularly important one in west Africa,
where soil moisture is a huge impact on whether or not it rains.
So given all of this, the research that I've been doing
for the last couple of years has shown
that Africa is no longer self-sufficient.
I mean, they really need, they rely on, importing food
from the international commodities market just like everyone else.
And this is because their yields have not increased since 1950.
There's been very little investment in technology such as irrigation,
improved seeds, fertilizer,
and it means that Africa's agriculture is far more
weather-dependent than everybody else's agriculture.
Because if it doesn't rain, they do not have technology
or technological, you know, assistance, for example,
drip irrigation, to help them produce, even when it's really dry.
And the impact of this lack of investment and the lack of increases
in yield means that Sub-Saharan Africa, the place that, you know,
we do a lot of work in early warning systems, has seen an increase
in the number of people malnourished,
or have undernourishment, whereas everyone else, south Asia,
east Asia, have seen a rapid decline since 1969,
in the number of people who are food insecure.
Now, notice, these are still a lot of people,
and so there's a lot more people, obviously, in east Asia,
and south Asia, than there are in Africa, but,
so the percentages are a significantly different.
However, we still have, Africa is really losing the development game.
Okay, so what is the impact of prices?
So, as we all know, last year was an extraordinary year.
We had a ridiculous increase in petroleum prices,
we had a huge amount of food price increases,
and then we had the big crash, and now, what was it this morning?
40 dollars a gallon?   40 dollars a barrel this morning?
I heard it on the radio.
And so these kinds of huge spikes have a huge impact on the ability
of people in Africa to access food.
And the reason is, is that there's a strong link between oil prices
in maize prices, when the price of petroleum is more
than 50 dollars a barrel.
When it's less than 50 dollars a barrel,
there's very little relationship.
And that's because, when oil is more than 50 dollars a barrel,
the sheer cost of moving your grain from one place
to another impacts its cost.
So, you see here, when it's over 50 dollars or 80 dollars a barrel,
we see a very strong relationship.
And anything underneath that, you have a big mess of points.
So, the impact of the huge price spike in 2008 was,
as you might expect, large numbers of food riots, social instability
in places with urban areas with lots of poor people in them,
and I won't go through all the different areas,
but you can see it was very well-distributed across the planet.
And, in some of the same countries, we had significant access problems.
And the reason for this is that, if you are, you know, a poor farmer,
and you live in northern Niger, you are only able to grow about 50%
of your annual requirement, your family's requirements, and,
that's it, so you need to come up with some sort of thing that you do
to get the rest of your family's food needs for the rest of the year.
So you are able to grow six months, and then you have
to buy six months of food on the market.
Those markets are very much influenced
by global commodity prices when they're high, but when they're low,
they're much more influenced by the local production.
So, all of these countries had price-related food insecurity.
And this one.
And there's a lot more food insecurity in South America
that isn't represented in this plot.   But they're in my opinion.
But I'm an African, I know a lot more
about Africa than South America.
So, now we're going to talk a little bit about west Africa.
So how does, what is the difference between west Africa and some
of these other regions, say, like, here, in the United States?
Something that we are well-aware of, since we all live here.
So, the environmental conditions are much more important
to peoples' ability to feed themselves in west Africa,
because it's an agricultural economy.
They're all agricultural economy, which means that 85% of the people
who live in the country have some connection to a farm,
or make their living off of trading commodities or doing something
which is agriculturally related.
And so, one of the things that is really important to remember is
that the transaction costs in Africa are huge.
This is because the roads are very small, they are full of potholes,
we have transportation that looks like this, and the markets look
like this, and, basically, everyone who is in the market buys
and sells food in kilograms, or half a kilo of grain at a time,
and so we have many, many traders
who are trading very very tiny amounts.
And I like to compare this to when you buy a loaf of bread at Wal-Mart,
the number of transactions, you can literally count them on one hand.
So you have the famer who produced the food, the grain,
he sold it to a grain elevator, that's one.
The grain elevator guy buys it from 50 farmers,
and then he sells his grain to the bread guy,
the bread maker, say Wonderbread.   That's two.
And Wonderbread makes 50,000 loaves of bread, which they sell,
all of them to Wal-Mart, that's three, and then they move the bread
from there, and then you are four when you buy that bread.
That's four transactions.
That means you have massive industrial scale and efficiencies.
In Africa, you have maybe 50,000 different transactions
for the same amount of grain.
And that's because everyone buys themselves in such tiny amounts.
The farmer himself, when he harvests his grain, he takes, you know,
a small bag, to the market, and sells that grain in order
to buy clothes and shoes for his children, or to pay off debts
that he incurred during the year, and then the person he sold
that to sells little tiny amounts of the grain to 50 other people,
and so if you do the math, you see how inefficient the system is,
and how every time you sell, buy and sell,
everyone will get a profit, a piece of the piece.
And that makes the food system there extremely inefficient,
and it means that local production is at the center of food security,
because it's so inefficient to move the grain from one place to another,
and what happens is, you end up eating the grain
that was produced right near where you live.
And the impact of that is when you have a drought
in a particular place, which is a local, if you have a drought,
that affects a system like this, it has a hugely different impact
than when you have a drought in an industrial system.
In an industrial system, it hardly matters if Wal-Mart buys the grain
from Kansas or from Argentina.
The difference is simply, it's actually very hard
to tell the difference from our point of view,
because the commodity price, the commodity markets,
take transportation into account, whereas if you eat the food
which is locally produced when you have a drought, each farmer,
you have a massive collapse of the market, because, if you're a farmer,
you usually produce 150% of your needs, right,
and all of the suddent, you only produce 50% of that,
not only do you, you no longer have an income,
but all of the sudden your outlay expenses for feeding your family go
up by four, because you all of the sudden have to buy food
which you used to have to grow yourself.
And so, you see what I'm saying.   So they get both ends of this.
It's really quite, this is why environment
and climate change will have such a big impact in these kinds
of subsistence systems, because if you can see that if you're a farmer
and that's your major, that's the only source of income,
you're really in big trouble.
So, environmental variability in west Africa is a big driver of a lot
of the activity, of what everyone is very very conservative,
and they don't invest.
They don't put their investment in agriculture because it's too risky.
They do what everyone else does.
They put it in, you know, markets, and they invest in bicycles,
or they invest in cell phones, they don't invest in agriculture,
and this is one of the reasons why the yield has not increased
at all since 1950.
We're not investing there, they certainly are not going to invest
in their own agricultural potential, either.
So, you know, the capital flight
from this region is ten times what it is in the US.
If you can imagine.
So, remote sensing, coming back to the remote sensing.
It's a very big player in trying to figure out,
what's going on in these subsistence systems
because of the humongous diversity, we really need to know
when there's a problem which is in a large enough area
to affect a large enough number of markets.
So, remote sensing provides a very clear identification of changes
in agricultural production over multiple markets,
which otherwise we would never know about, it's the earliest source
of information and it's also the least controversial.
You can imagine that for USAID it's very hard to make decisions,
if you get information only from the countries who are concerned,
because they are obviously very interested, sometimes,
in getting assistance, because it's a huge source
of external information, and external, you know,
funds for their country, and very, a lot, you know, the presidents,
you have a lot of things like the president himself owns half the
trucks in the country kind of thing.   So that might be a problem.
So, remote sensing is a very easy way to get everyone on board,
and remote sensing that I'm particularly,
I spent a lot of time looking at its vegetation index,
which basically looks at how green the ground is,
and what can be directly related to whether
or not the crop is very well-watered and happy, basically.
So photosynthesizing, the green index is high,
and if it's not photosynthesizing well the green index is low.
However, we have another different, big difference between subsistence
and industrial agriculture, in that, here is an example
of the industrial system where you have these big fields,
you see these roads here, there's very little natural vegetation
in this one kilometer pixel, which is bounded by this little square.
But here is the same one kilometer pixel in Africa, and this is in,
I forget where it is, I think it's in CAR,
but here you see these little tiny white flecks, which are the fields,
because they're all hand-hoed, they're very very tiny,
and so you get a lot of natural vegetation mixed
up with the agricultural vegetation, which , and this is a problem
which we have a lot of issues with, but we're able
to still derive information from the remote sensing,
and a study I did a couple years ago has shown that we are able
to relate, to route to agricultural production ,
and then agricultural production to the price of food.
So, when there's a widespread drought, you have a large increase
in prices, and when the growing season was really great,
the prices of food falls to the floor.
So you can imagine, if you're a famer it's really a bummer,
because when the prices are great, you have nothing to sell.
And when you produced a lot, you have no market,
because everyone else produced a lot.
So it's really a very difficult situation.
And world market integration has not really helped, unfortunately,
because people in the middle of the continent has very little access,
and so limited integration for these Nigerian, the famers in Niger,
basically leads to a lack of a strong expert market,
reducing their ability to profit when prices are high,
but the low purchasing power cause [unintelligible] food prices
when the world market is really high.
They're unable to access that market.
So all of these things mean that things like this occurs in 2005,
Niger had a big food security crisis,
and it was because of increasing food prices in other regions,
and demand for their food, but not from local production problems.
So, the close association of local food prices
to environmental conditions means that when there is a drought,
we have a huge, even in the region, we have a huge increase in prices
and that causes a food security disaster.
Even when there's enough food in the market,
because people just cannot buy the food.
Okay, so that is all I'm going to say about west Africa.
To summarize, basically, increasing number of people, urbanization,
fossil fuel shortages and transformation
of the commodity market all work together to make adaptation
to climate change really complicated.
Particularly in regions that, like west Africa, that so, agriculture,
they really have a lot of problems to respond to climate change.
And how we respond to these crises really makes a big difference.
If we're able to provide assistance which will help their markets,
strengthen their markets, strengthen their roads,
we'll do a much better job than simply giving them food.
Giving them food will destroy their markets
and further reduce the incentives to invest in agricultural production.
So,one of the solutions
that my colleague Chris Funk [spelled phonetically] really
believe in is that a big adaptation to climate change in this region is
to produce more food, to really invest in agriculture.
If we can increase the per-capita production,
particularly in these food-insecure regions,
we will reduce food insecurity by reducing reliance
on international markets, and to get farmers,
small farmers to invest in their own land again.
So, and clearly, there's the amount of food, this is a plot which shows
that yield gains are linear here.
This basically shows that the use of food,
if there were no hungry people in the world.
So if everyone ate this same amount of food,
everyone ate our standard 2,000 calorie diet, and you know,
in the US we are not doing this,
and we know in Africa they are not doing this
but if everyone ate 2,000 calories a day, exactly, this is the amount
of food we would need for everyone.
In actuality, of course, our production goes like this.
It jumps all over the place, right?
And it means that this gap here means
that there are a lot of people who are not.
We're really not winning the game.
We're going to pretty soon have a lot
of trouble feeding everyone at the same level.
We're not producing enough food for everyone on the planet,
and this gap is going to increase.
Now if we look at the production in the top five aid receivers
for food security crises, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania,
Zambia and Zimbabwe, we see this is a curve showing the population
increase, and here are the statistics, the actual statistics
for cropped area, seeds and fertilizer.
The use that Chris Funk and I basically say
that this is agricultural capacity.
So the amount of area that you plant, how much,
how many seeds you buy to plant, and the fertilizer you use
on that is the agricultural capacity.
And the gap here, is the number, is the growing gap
between agricultural capacity and population.
And here, we have rainfall.
And you notice, the rainfall trend is quite insignificant,
it's not very impressive, so what I'm trying to conclude here is that,
in fact, it's really the climate is the least of our troubles.
In this kind of situation, you know, whether
or not it rains is quite irrelevant.   If it rains, it's great.
If it doesn't rain, it's really bad, but in either case,
we have nine million unfed people every year in Ethiopia alone.
And that's just because there are too many people who are trying
to do agriculture at the same time.   And that's all they're trying to do.
And that's it, you know, so, we extended this model from 2000
to 2030, and we said, okay, so if we have just population increase
and no further investment in agriculture, we see that by 2030,
we have 110 food-insecure people, which are, incidentally,
we are going to have to feed, because Anderson Cooper,
although by 2030 he may have retired,
people like Anderson Cooper are not going to let us get away
with just ignoring half the world while they're starving, right?
I mean, if you think we're going to just ignore this problem,
I think it's going to be really expensive.
We're already spending, what is it, 500 million dollars
on food assistance every year in one form or another.
Maybe 250 in strictly food aid.   So, and that's million dollars.
So here we are in 2000.
So this is population increase, right?
This gray one here is with modeled reductions and precipitation.
So if you couple the increase in population with the increase in,
reductions in rainfall, and temperature increases,
we have nearly 200 million undernourished people
in these five countries.
But the good news is, if we spend some of this money
that we would have put in food aid on agricultural development
in drip irrigation systems that use very little water.
There's hydroponic solutions for vegetables.
There are so many great investments that we could make in Africa
to increase food production.
We can reduce the food-insecure to a fraction of what they are today.
To look at this in a different way, we can see that,
so this is the projected change in yields from today to 2030,
given a linear, you know, yield, increase,
so this is obviously the big juggernaut over here, east Asia,
7500, this is actually above the expected yield potential.
So this is, like, this is the best case, this is the,
if all those seed companies just do the miracle that they keep promising
for our US taxpayer dollar, so it's 7500 kilograms per hectare.
It's just ridiculously high.
So, suppose that this is what happens, right.
Everyone else, we have 3,000, 7,000 in the US and Canada,
4,000 but look at Africa.
We're still, just ridiculously low levels of yields.
So if we can, it's actually so much easier to increase yields in places
that only get 1,000 kilograms per hectare,
than to try to increase China's already ridiculously productive
agricultural systems to 7,000.
In other words, if you're at 6,000 kilograms per hectare and you want
to go up to 7,000, you have to double the amount of water,
triple the amount of fertilizer, it's actually, technically,
nearly infeasible given the number of people in the region
and the stress on the resources already.
Why don't we invest in trying to increase the amount of production
in these regions, so we no longer have to ship food
from Indonesia to Africa?
We can have the people there, use their land productively,
and I'm not saying that agricultural development is easy.
I mean, clearly, it's not easy, but we haven't been trying very hard.
I can say that since 1950, the investment
in Africa is the entire region has been reduced
to 30% of what it was in 1950.
And, at the same time, the Africans themselves are shipping
out their money to France and the US, because they also say,
this ship is sinking, my money's going out, so, you know,
to invest in increasing these, you know,
the very very low productive capacity
in these regions is a much better bet
than simply take food that's produced here and mail it
over here every time there's a crisis, essentially.
So that's my pitch.
So, in conclusion, population expansion is coupled with reductions
in yield is a big threat to food security in regions
with limited purchasing power, and might I add,
to much of the rest of the world as well.
So it's not just that we, that they are going
to be highly food-insecure.
In 20, 30, 40 years, we're going to really come in to a problem
of trying to feed everyone on the planet, and someone's going
to go short, and there are sure to be wars fought over this.
Local food markets, large and small, respond to variations
in local production, as well as to global prices.
So, again, local production is absolutely the center
of food security for the developing world at the moment.
They have not moved into the industrial system,
and local production is so central to the economy and to food security,
which is why remote sensing is so important, why remote sensing is
so critical to not only monitoring the food security in these regions
that are threatened, but also for our own commodity prices,
we use remote sensing extensively
and the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service determine whether
or not commodity prices are going to go up or down.
And finally, increasing productivity
of marginal agricultural areas is really the key.
It's the only way to hedge against the fact that we're at peak oil now,
and that from every decade that goes by once we get
out of this tricky phase that we're in, hopefully soon,
the stock market will start going back up again,
and when that happens, it's very likely that petroleum prices will go
up again above 50, 80 dollars a barrel, and when that happens,
these places that have such little purchasing power will have trouble
competing with the large industrializing regions
of the world.   Thank you.
[applause] We have lots of time, so if anyone wants to ask a question.
Yes? Male Speaker: Do you have an idea
of how much investment would be required?
[inaudible] Molly Brown: Yeah.   Quite a lot.
But, you know, there's so much stuff that can be done for so little.
Like, in Kenya, for example, or Rwanda, I should say,
Rwanda has been a great example where they refuse to take the advice
of the World Bank and are simply giving away fertilizer
and they double their yields in the past five years.
And they basically say, we don't care about your market theory,
we refuse to believe you, and we're just going to give away
and every year they've given away fertilizer, and that, sort of,
government investment
in agricultural development, you see what I'm saying?
Because if you have fertilizer, then you might as well invest in seeds.
You can use your fertilizer as a collateral on a loan,
you can see half of it and take the rest, you know,
so there's so much stuff that can be done with just,
we're not talking a lot of money.
But I can tell you that one of the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently entered the fray
in the last 12 months.
They've started a huge agricultural development project,
and in that project, they have no country can get a dime unless they
invest 10% of their national income in agriculture.
And that will make a huge difference.
If the government will do it, because, right now, frankly,
no farmer would invest in their own.
I mean, there's huge amounts of money leaving that region.
So we need to sort of begin to change that.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Well, I know very little
about that, but I can tell you that the recent assessment
on agriculture, the IIASTD, and don't ask me for the name
of the acronym, but it's a really great study,
and that is eloquent on the transgenic crops.
And basically, in my opinion, we aren't doing, that's step number 52,
and we're not doing steps 1-5 yet, and so, that's so irrelevant
at the moment, and the big, I'm interested in the big, big picture.
You know, we have so much obvious stuff to do at the moment.
So, why argue, even slightly, about transgenic crops?
If people are not even, they're using seeds which they've used
for centuries that have 5,000 different kinds of phenotype.
I mean, we just need to get them to work on three or four.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Yeah.
But, I think the agricultural development community has rejected
this argument quite effectively.   From what I can tell.
But it's quite outside my personal expertise.
Yes? Male Speaker: What are the landowners [inaudible].
Are they tribal, or are they, or is the land held in habitually,
does the government own [inaudible]?
Molly Brown: The answer is yes, all of the above.
It's a very complex, very immature and extraordinarily expensive
to change anything to do.
So they are trying to, you know, one of the big things, of five
or ten years ago, was tenure rights, and let's change the system,
you can't have the government own everything, but they, you know,
it's like, if you have a piece of property on the New Jersey coast,
then you're willing to spend 10,000 dollars to get your title fixed.
If you have a piece of property in the middle of Niger,
50 miles outside of Niame [spelled phonetically] with no road
and no rainfall, and you wouldn't spend three cents per acre
to figure it out, you know, literally.
[inaudible] Because the option is to move to Niame.
A lot of people are doing that, you know.
But in the meantime there's always the Oldga [spelled phonetically]
people, and they're, you know, they are able to hang
on a do some agriculture, and meanwhile, they do five
or ten other things, nobody is only an agriculturist anymore.
Everybody does everything.   Male Speaker: Like what?
[inaudible] Molly Brown: Yes!   Yes, literally.
I mean, the value of the property is zero, more or less.
You can't give it away, and so, what's really eloquent is to look
at this plot shows you, you know, this is the productivity per worker,
you know, the yellow line there is east Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa,
it's negative since 1950.   It's just bad.
It's terrible, you know.
Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] [talking simultaneously] Molly
Brown: No, no I don't.   No, I agree with you.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: But- Female Speaker:
We need a new model that isn't quite- Molly Brown: No, I agree.
Notice I haven't said anything about John Deere, and I agree with you,
but there's a lot more we can do.   There's no one, I think, the fact
that there's four times more people now
than in 1950 has to be dealt with.
I mean, we cannot, I think food aid does not work.
It does not work.
It destroys the markets, and it's harmful for everyone,
and no one likes corn from Kansas.
If you are used to white corn from beautiful sweet white corn
from Zimbabwe, and you're all
of the sudden eating this hard yellow stuff, no one likes that.
I mean, we must do something.
I'm not an advocate for transferring the large fields.
However, it would be nice, to produce a lot more food
in regions that can do it.
Think of the, there's a wonderful place
in Kenya called the Big Five region in Kenya
that has increased their yields by five times in the past 10 years.
By doing some big changes, they have some irrigation,
they have some larger fields, they also invest in seeds and fertilizer,
but that small area is able to feed nine tenths of the people
who are then able to continue a traditional agriculture.
So I'm not saying that I do not think that it's even possible,
even conceivable, to move, but we must do something.
Because what we're doing now does not work.
We've got to do something.
Yes? Male Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Desperate need to do, right.
Male Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Right.
Maybe it's just roads.
We just get a road in there, and it will do something, you know.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Hydroponics, you know.
It could be anything.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Absolutely.
That's right.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Right.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: I can tell you
that when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal,
the minute you brought 50 bucks to the table, your fabulous,
incredibly, you know, incredibly enthusiastic partners were all
instantly replaced with the scoundrels
and the worst of the worst.
So, you know, money really will destroy the local.
What I am really advocating is local investment in local,
and to try to bring some solutions which can come in and invest
in the ones that work locally.
So, I do not have a lot of hope about these big transfers
of mechanisms from one, from CO2 capture.
What really will help, is what will really help Africans is to try
to get a hold, put the money in our own problem.
We need to stop putting CO2 and other greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere, so we don't transform their climate before they
get a chance.
And now our climate too, incidentally.
Everybody's climate before we all get a chance
to figure out what to do.
If we don't move fast, we're going to all be in a pickle of trouble,
and we're going to have
as much trouble getting grain as everyone else.
I think that we need to spend our own money cleaning up our own house.
And we need to be giving technology to places like China and India,
and cleaning up their act, and just saying,
I don't care about you know, sovereignity.
Please, please take our technology and fix your problems
so the ship doesn't go down.
Because there is no place for the rats to go to, you know.
I seriously, I want us to fix our own problem.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: I mean,
look at all the great help development has caught,
great development that the last 50 years of development.
I don't work for AID.
I mean, this is one of the reasons I really do not believe development,
in quotes, works very well.
I think the only thing we can do is give people space and to try
to do our best to- Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Ah, I wish,
I know they do, I don't know.
I think that there are some Grameen Bank, for example,
is a great example, where, you know,
you have zero percent interest loans,
and small scale, it's got to be small.
It's got to be locally sensitive,
politically adapted to the local situation.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: I totally agree.
I do not know.   You are talking to the wrong person.
Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown:
It's a typical neo-liberalist policy that if you provide something
for free, you will destroy the system,
whereas if you make someone pay for it, you'll create a market,
whereas in fact if you're dealing with people
who only make 35 cents a day, they do not have any money,
and therefore will just continue on.
They cannot, they do not have the resources
to buy fertilizer at market value.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: To purchase.
And the government has never had enough money to, they just couldn't,
by giving away the fertilizer, you start a whole,
you then provide a farmer with a standard amount
and they can sell half of it and buy improved seeds and seeds
which can be used with fertilizer, you know what I'm saying?
So, you know.
So, agriculture is not as complicated
as political and economic systems.
So at least, you know, we know some things about it.
Yes. [inaudible] Cassava.   Such a great thing.
Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Right.
It's yummy.
I mean, I think it's a good idea to, the only issue with cassava,
I've heard, is that it takes a lot of security.
You can't do cassava agriculture in places without security.
So, Niger, eastern Niger, and Chad, you know, Angola, people will come
and steal your cassava plants, because it's an 18-month crop.
Yeah. So, yes, Jeannie [spelled phonetically].
Female Speaker: This may be a difficult question requirement,
an answer you don't have.
But do you have some sense of how close we are to being able
to predict regional participation due
to [inaudible] Molly Brown: Not close at all.
I do not think we're very close.   [talking simultaneously] I mean,
I think that it really does depend on the region.
But, in African in particular, there's a great paper by Cook
and Vissy [spelled phonetically] that shows that,
of the 25 IPCC models, only three have a realistic representation
of the climate, where your easterly waves are going east, not west,
you know, so that actually has some realistic,
and even with those three, one says that climate won't change a lot,
one says it's going to get a lot wetter,
and one says it's going to get a lot drier.
So, particularly in Africa, they're really hard
up for good data and information.   It's really quite bad.
But things are changing really fast.
I'm not a climate scientist, there are a lot of other people.
But, you know, it's very hard to do good, you know,
the water cycle is very difficult, and you know representation
of those clouds is a tricky problem.   [unintelligible] is very difficult.
Yes. Female Speaker: [inaudible] The Library has a site where they listen
to webcasts, but it does say that [inaudible] Molly Brown:
You can come and get my card, and I will send you a Powerpoint.
Yes. Sorry.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown:
Well, it's not just in Africa.   It's globally, you know.
Female Speaker: [inaudible] Molly Brown: Very true.
And you know why?
It's because, if you are a woman, right, and you want to,
if you're highly insecure, you have 10 kids,
because half of them will die of one thing or another,
and you're just really, horribly nervous, and you need more people,
so actually, in Africa, it's been a very under populated continent.
Africa is actually very under populated compared to China.
There's 10 times more people per square foot
in China than there is in Africa.   The problem is, is the technology.
Technology changes the sort of environment-people equation.
The problem is, is that they were operating, you know,
the traditional, you know, so there's no linear relationship.
It's, you know, it's not a Malthusian equation,
let me put it that way.
So there's actually a very huge labor shortage during the
agricultural season, because everyone is out there
with their hoe, you know, and literally,
there's not enough people to, you know, to make all the fields
which are needed, because they're using hoes.
Right? So there's really not enough people in some ways.
The problem is, is that when you have places like Ethiopia, right,
they have the same amount of land and resources, and more people now,
finally, than the kind of technology and what everyone's trying to do
with agriculture, so it's a problem.
So, I mean, what I'm trying to say is that I do not believe
in Malthusian, you know, sort of projections of gloom and doom.
What we need to do is have some people do some other stuff,
like making chips or something.   I don't know.
I'm not an economist.
But, you see what I'm saying, we've got to get some people
to do something other than agriculture
so that they can compete on the global scale.
Yes, you can help me out.   Thank you very much.
[inaudible] The technology is the big factor, yeah.
[inaudible] Correct.   [inaudible] Yeah.
Exactly. I mean- [inaudible] Right.   It's a great-- - go ahead.
[inaudible] Exactly.
Yeah. No, I totally agree.   Yeah. The more evapo-transportation.
But we know that one of the reasons why the models work so poorly
in west Africa is because there's no feedback between the atmosphere
and the land is inadequate.
So they just consider that the whole land is a uniform,
has a uniform food soil moisture, which is obviously not true,
because some places are wetter than others, so you can really see
where it has rained once, at the beginning of the rainy season,
it continues to rain and that place ends up with twice as much rain
as a place a hundred miles away, where it didn't happen
to rain early on this season.
And so, you know, soil moisture, NASA's putting
up a new soil moisture mission
which we hope will greatly improve our ability to predict, seasonally,
in the next season, the rainfall in west Africa.
It's very similar to here, you know [inaudible] There are.
Exactly. [inaudible] Yeah.   Then you have a lot of trouble,
suppose we had perfect forecasts for next season.
Would it help a lot?   You have to ask yourself a question.
What can we do?   How would we change the system?
What about crop insurance?   The list goes on and on.
So there's so much stuff that needs to be done,
but we really must start focusing on putting the resources where,
effectively, the resources where it's needed.
And I think that we are done.
Yes. Exactly.   Thank you, thank you all for coming.
[applause] This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]